Defending capitalism: Neoliberal knowledge during the Covid-19 pandemic and inflationary period

The compounding crises of the early 2020s – the Covid-19 pandemic, government-led lockdowns and economic programmes, the uptake in inflation followed by more state-funded help – posed serious challenges to neoliberal logics about the economy and the state’s role in it. These logics have previously been essential to securing legitimacy for capitalist structures, but have been increasingly contested, particularly in major crises. This thesis examines the strategies that actors in the neoliberal thought collective, invested in neoliberal ideas and their promotion, use to defend neoliberal capitalism in its weakest moments. Through qualitative document analysis and interviews, it analyses the cases of ten free market think tanks in the UK and Germany. It finds that their ideological adherence to core neoliberal concepts allowed them to formulate coherent narratives about the pandemic and inflation crises and advocate a common policy programme. Differences between neoliberal schools of thought, country contexts and institutional types added nuances that helped think tanks adjust discourse to target audiences and formulate a collective liberal identity based on their differences. Simultaneously, this adherence to ideology limited their direct policy influence. The findings suggest the role of neoliberal think tanks has shifted into a defensive position, within which they have switched from directly influencing policy to coordinating and disseminating pure neoliberal ideology, reconfiguring their place in networks that work to legitimise neoliberal capitalism from policy vanguards to ideological defenders.